Q&A: Maximilian Toth '97
The art world has taken notice of artist Maximilian Toth '97, and not just because his mammoth pieces (stretching as much as fifty feet) are impossible to ignore. The New York Times credited Toth’s “febrile hand and a good sense for off-center narrative.” The New York Sun called an early show “an alluring debut.” Toth answered questions for Concord Academy magazine.
You've gotten a lot of attention at a young age. Was there a big break that put your career on track?
This is the first time I have been asked to answer questions like this and I am finding it more difficult than I imagined it would be. I believe the truth is that many contemporary artists starting a career are around my age or even younger. It's a constant point of debate within the art world. I had the good fortune of being part of an exemplary class from an already prestigious graduate program. In fact, we received so much attention, we were ranked as one of the finest graduate painting classes in the country. The Jack Tilton Gallery in New York curated a show from the best graduate schools' open studios on the East Coast. All the reviews were favorable and focused on the age of the artists and the surprising success of a show of artists that were all still students.
My acceptance to the Yale School of Art was probably my single biggest break. I've watched the admissions process and though talent is a factor, in art most things are subjective and there are many worthy applicants that don't make it for whatever reasons. I applied twice before I was accepted. A large part of my education and inspiration has come from my fellow students.
Do you intend your art as social commentary?
At some point I believe that all art has some social commentary tethered to it. You are making an object that is going to be put into public viewing. And once something goes public, especially labeled "this is art," people make assumptions and judgments and then find a way to relate to that object. When a piece of art is made it usually carries some intended social associations, and often one finds new associations once it is let loose into the world.
I often deal with similar themes within my work. It usually centers on young men, or more specifically, young, white suburban men, engaging in the world around them. And I find that I am most interested in those stories that are retold when groups of friends get together. The stories that have survived the years and remain both as markers for a time or a person but also retain a seemingly timeless entertainment. All the stories that I work with are either biographic or autobiographic. But many of these stories do more than make us laugh; they are the times that we messed up because we were still unfamiliar, we were still figuring things out.
I don't like working with stories of little children because they don't know any better. I prefer my subjects a little older, when you are aware of what you have been taught but you are still working your way through what you actually think, believe, and feel. This tends to be moments when we are most physical. In the physical moments we are forced to act as well as think and figure out how to best balance our responses and ourselves.
Can you explain this in context of a specific work?
- "We Are This and That is Other"
In the painting "We Are This and That is Other," a group of young men wrestles a bull. The image is from a summer vacation with my family to small town in the south of France. St. Hilaire had just one road that ran through the middle of it. Once a summer, during the Fête, they staged their version of the running of the bulls. They would line the street with BFI bins and flatbeds, and the whole town would seek refuge. Two trucks blocked off the one hundred yards of road at either end, and the Commorage (French cowboys) released the bulls. A group of five or six of us would hide between the bins until the young bulls passed and we could run into the fray. The first bull that someone grabbed was the one the rest of us threw ourselves into the task of pulling until it came to a stop. The small town would cheer and we would let it go, and whoever was holding the tail would then ski down the dung-smeared cobblestones until they lost balance or dove to safety. It was exhilarating.
In the painting, I wanted the action to be the entire composition. Though the crowd plays a part, it's those first moments of uncertainty of where to position your hands and who goes where. In that moment, it is possible to see children becoming men, you can see society being created, you see man as part of nature as well as in dominion over nature. There is something beautiful and compelling about young men being able to pull this brutal power to a halt for no more of a reason than celebration and gamesmanship.
"Out of the Ocean, Onto the Pier: A Progression Towards Felix Culpa" is a vivid memory of jumping off the pier in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, during my childhood summers. Compositionally it is depicted as a progression from childhood toward adulthood. In the piece, from left to right, the young floating subject in the water may as well be in embryonic fluid. The girl moves up the ladder onto the pier, and a group of kids are at play without any flirting or sexualized interest. They are relatively innocent. The clubhouse to the right is the first introduction of affiliations with the flags; the two older kids are fully clothed and entwined, while the cast on the hand of the perched boy portrays the introduction of consequences. The clothes of those playing are in a pile on the bench waiting for them. This painting's title comes from Milton's Paradise Lost, which I first read at CA. And there is a moment where Milton has the protagonist Adam refer to the fall as the Felix Culpa, the happy accident—acknowledging that, though some things were lost, we may have lucked into something else.
What could I learn about you that would help me understand your art?
My earliest memory in life is being on Bourbon Street drawing with chalk near Big Daddy's Strip Club when I was barely able to walk. The club has a pair of plastic legs with a pink garter and black high heels that swing in and out of two holes over the door. I wondered how the woman, whom I believed to be real, got up there, and what it must be like in the mysterious cavernous room, with a woman swinging thirty feet above the crowd, and how thrilling it must be to swing that high.
Please discuss some of your major influences.
I have had passionate art teachers since Mr. Negrin in the fifth grade in the Carlisle public schools. Then I was fortunate enough to attend Concord Academy, which, after more than one person's fair share of schooling under my belt, I believe is still one of the best schools I had the privilege to attend. For inspiration I had Jonathan [Smith], Jessica [Straus], and Chris [Rowe] in the arts, but also Gary Hawley, Sandy Stott, and Stephen Teichgraeber. English, reading, movies have always been major influences on how I learn to work with stories. My streak of good luck with teachers continued through Trinity and the College of Art and Design and into Yale's graduate art school.
My family has been a major influence on me, and they have always welcomed nearly complete strangers so warmly into our house that I have a tangled web of extended family of no blood relation at all that spans from an amazing artist from Gulfport, Mississippi, named Tazewell Morton, who designed one of the flags on the moon, to a mining crew from Scotland, who wrote a collective recommendation for CA, to my father's football cohort in Arizona, who surgically changed his name to Stephanie. To a kid she was just a tall blond with big hands.
My mother's love for an odd person's story, or maybe for each person's unique story, was a wonderful treat for a child to wake up to each morning. These strangers would show up seemingly from nowhere and stay a couple of days or a couple of months, leaving behind their influences.
What influence, if any, has your family's business in advertising had on your art?
My father has been one of the major influences in my life. He was a painter in college. He is a visual man with a gift for seeing more than most. From those early days, when I was drawing with a fist grip on a pen that smelled like grape, he would always be able to help without ever making me feel that what I was doing wasn't good enough. We played, making art together, and it made me better, and it still does. His company is an extension of him. I learned to look at the world in visual languages and often in moments that were capable of encapsulating an entire attitude or idea. I watched and worked with him from when I was twelve years old. I learned a work ethic, patience, and I learned that you can work and still be playing, always having fun. He ran a small shop out of Concord, Massachusetts, and handled some of America's biggest clients. He did not see anything as impossible or beyond him and surrounded himself with talented people.
Who are your favorite current-day artists?
Damien Hirst and Walton Ford are two of my favorite living artists. Hirst's level of craft and finish are nearly perfect. He works with themes of mortality and death in ways that are both smart and poetic. He has found themes deep enough to unify bodies of work that at first seem to have nothing in common. Ford is one of the best painters on the planet. He makes beautiful paintings on a commanding scale that are at once delicate and brutal. His narratives are entertaining and intelligent.
I also really admire the work of my peers at Yale. I work closely with two members of my graduating class: Tavares Strachan and Titus Kaphar. Both are inspirational and talented artists who function as sounding boards for nearly all my work. There is a young artist in LA named Antonio Puleo who has been something of a mentor and is actually a Watertown native. Also, Travis Farmen, who is another contemporary LA artist and possesses a unique vision and understanding of the world.
At CA you demonstrated a serious interest in both drawing and film. Are you still involved in film? How does that interest inform your paintings and drawings?
I wish I were more involved with film today, and if dreams come true I may be again at some point. I think that the narratives that inspire my work could easily lend themselves to being explored in the film medium.
Even in their current form, my paintings and drawings owe a lot to film. It is easier to watch a strong narrative be built in film these days than it is in most paintings. Partly because not all painting cares so much about the creation of story and partly because it is difficult to compete against the awe that is cinematic narrative. Good films often contain many moments that leave me in awe—scenes that compositionally will directly influence choices in my work, or stylistic touches that create moods. David Mamet wrote a great book on directing that I refer to often. I believe that attending a high school that offered me years of film classes has made me a better artist.
You attended a small Texas college then went to Yale for graduate school. What was that contrast like? Does it show up in your art?
I think that it has definitely been important that I was born in the South, raised in the East, and schooled in the West and Southwest. I have family in Texas; my father is from there. They don't have winters, that college has two pools, and they have breakfast tacos. That is why I attended Trinity. The social contrast doesn't actually hold as much weight as the similarities. Living in these different places and seeing these different sorts of things and people simply helped form a more unified view of humanity and America.
Some things looked different. I spent time in Mississippi when I was younger and saw racism more clearly displayed than I ever had up to that point. But it made me aware when I came back east. I then began to be able to see it in its more subtle forms.
The New York Times, in a summary of one of your shows, said you have "a good sense for off-center narrative." What's the root of that?
When I was growing up, amidst the non-blood tangle of relations I had some older brother types who taught me a great lesson. They were speaking about girls, but I have found that it applies in most places. They told me that they didn't want to hear about when things went well. Those stories were boring and often without any detail. They wanted to hear when things went wrong; you always felt like you had to explain those moments, there were better details, and in the end it made me more comfortable with approaching that side of the story. It has made me more comfortable throughout my life to fail and even enjoy doing so.
In another article, your drawings were said to look like "impromptu" chalk drawings. How long does it take to complete a typical drawing? How much time to conceptualize, vs. to actually draw?
The paintings are influenced by my drawings, and I spend much of my time conceptualizing and don't do many preliminary sketches. There is something motivating about the creation of the image from a fresh canvas. I lose interest if I am remaking something I have already fully fleshed out, so I keep notes, constantly sitting on certain compositions, and then trying them in different configurations in my head or on napkins before I touch a canvas. There are times I have a painting that I think about every day for months before the idea finally sees light. Then the most thoroughly realized is manifested. I stretch raw canvas to the wall, prime it, and begin to work. The actual art-making takes about a month, depending on the size and amount of detail involved. On average, they stand nearly eight to ten feet tall and range from seven to fifteen feet wide. I completed a painting recently that appeared in a show at the Dallas Contemporary Center and at a Minneapolis gallery that is twelve feet by fifty feet. It took a month just to prime and prepare the surface. I have been more willing to work smaller since its completion.
Your works are dark and dramatic. Do you sometimes intend to shock (case in point: "Witnesses Awaiting Judgment in a Great Vomit of Blood")?
Yes and no. I never want to shock a viewer so that they end up not being able to enter the work. Part of the reason that I work on the scale that I do is so that the image encompasses the viewer. One can then get lost in the line or the surface, parts of the painting, and as it floats together the narrative becomes a whole. The stories that I am drawn to are usually physical in nature. Specifically "Witnesses"—the title is taken from a Cormac McCarthy novel. And the image is a scene from a personal experience at Mardi Gras, where, amidst a drunken, half-dressed crowd bartering flesh for beads and enjoying every moment, I had my first experience watching someone get shot and killed. Although the contrast between ecstasy and death seems like it should be strong, in my mind I can't separate the violent act from the sea of people around it. It almost fits and makes sense. I mean this without moral judgment of any kind. Visually and even reasonably, the whole scene fits. And I believe that often in life–although this incident is more bombastic than some others–we are surrounded by but don't like to acknowledge how physical this world is. This physicality always surrounds us, but I think we often shock ourselves in these instances when we really become aware of it. Just as the painting shocks after you have already, hopefully, found some beauty in it. I believe that beauty exists in the moments that would normally be peripheral or abject, and I am trying to show that.